After introductions and the necessary sign-in paper work was complete it was decided to assign Ms. Turnbull a second floor room. While the sole down stairs room would have saved considerable huffing and puffing, Dean feared the smaller quarters and especially the bed would not adequately accommodate the woman's substantial mass. A second trip to her rental car for a computer, two briefcases and a box of papers confirmed the wisdom of his choice of the larger room.
"Beautiful! Beautiful!" Ms. Turnbull called, with child-like enthusiasm as Dean heaved her luggage up the stairs behind her. His view of her sweat pants in front of him were like a sack of footballs being dragged back to the locker room after a high school scrimmage. She paused at the top to catch her breath and he did the same, before she poked around her new digs. "Me and Belfair will love it!"
Belfair, she explained, in rapid-fire falsetto, was the heroine of a series of intergalactic romances she was writing. She was an author, she explained with a puff of her ample bosom, and had just returned from Roswell, New Mexico, Mecca of the strange and alien.
"I'm so psyched!" she rambled, thrusting a suitcase on the bed. "I can hardly wait to go to sleep!"
"I'm sure you're exhausted," Cynthia said as she followed the pair into the room. "The bed's very comfortable." Fred, who had tagged along, beat a hasty retreat downstairs, making the excuse of a trip to the library.
"Oh, no! I don't mean I'm tired! Lord knows, I'm sure the bed's comfortable but sleeping is when I write! Belfair visits me in the nighttime! You see, I dream all Belfair's adventures and Roswell was such a marvelous experience! The aura there where real aliens actually roamed among us, well...it just took my breath away! I'm sure tonight we'll have scads of fun! Belfair is on the planet Draghow now and those Draghonian men are something else!" Wink, wink. The Deans followed Fred O'Connor's example. They too beat a hasty departure for the downstairs.
"What were we saying about strange guests?" Dean asked when they were alone in their quarters. "Perhaps we should charge her for a double room when Belfair shows up. Talk about out of this world!"
"Don't complain," Cynthia said. "Things have been pretty normal around here since last June." Her comments brought to mind the death of Bird Song's very first guest and the strange events that followed.
The balance of the afternoon was spent on household chores and packing away the last remnants of the holiday. Cynthia carefully hand washed the articles of clothing from Fred's box of historical goodies and hung them outside in the sun to dry. Dean reread the eleven letters he had only glanced at earlier. However, no words of century-old wisdom leapt from the pages. Each letter, written in excellent penmanship, began Dear Annie but there were no accompanying envelopes and no addresses. Each was signed, Your loving sister, Rachael Quincy. Each was nearly a copy of the others, unremarkable in its cold formality. None was longer than a page and each asked after Annie's health and wellbeing and then added a few lines that mentioned that all was well in Boston. One note described in two sentences a Sunday trip to the Public Gardens while another mentioned three years had passed since the sisters had seen one another. Four letters mentioned Rev. Martin and the wonderful work he and Annie were doing with 'the poor mistaken souls.' The second earliest dated letter expressed sorrow that the wedding could not take place in Boston and a gift was being shipped separately. All the letters were dated between November of 1898 and January of 1900. There was nothing unusual in the final epistle to indicate why the correspondence abruptly ended. Both Deans agreed the letters were polite but of zero historical interest and strangely unloving.